Earlier quoted context omitted.
“ We're better off with organizations who receive their money from donations. ” We get value, in exchange for value.
ITM?
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I Am Deleting the Blog
961–970 of 1001 posts
Re: I Am Deleting the Blog
#962Reading this made me think of two essays I've recently revisited. 1. The Sound of Silence, by Jessica Livingston Three years ago she argued that the smartest people are silencing themselves because the downside risk of being attacked for (misinterpretations of) their opinions are too high. People are wary of sharing useful information outside of trusted circles, which serves to consolidate power with insiders – those…
I'd say this forum is exactly this. How often have I self censored because I just don't want the downvotes?
Dudes, this comment has gone from 0 to 5 votes, I don't even know what to make of it any more.
Re: I Am Deleting the Blog
#963Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The implication being that the NYT wants to use real names to drive clicks and appease advertisers? This shows a lack of how journalism works. Using real names isn't to "drive clicks" and "appease advertisers." It's to add credibility to a story. Think about it: Does a furniture business advertising in the local paper care whether the victim of a shooting is named in a piece? Sure, the owner might know the victim,…
It is a pretty damn dubious measure of credibility and it has already failed when suggested for civility. I am honestly starting to think real name policies are just about hating anominity at this point.
The idea behind a real name policy is that you open yourself up for scrutiny and criticism. Since you can be held accountable for what you say you have an incentive to say the truth or at least avoid making mistakes. The reality is that on the internet thousands of people will criticize you for any arbitrary reason even if that reason is actually a fabricated lie or just a personal bias.
Re: I Am Deleting the Blog
#964I don't understand why traditional media still exists in modern days, when p2p communication between people is possible. In the best case, a journalist is a middleman who will misunderstand and garble information unintentionally, since they are working under deadline to get stuff published ASAP. Not only experts, but even enthusiasts spend much more time researching than journalists. In the worst and most common case…
P2P information is not only "expert blogs". Expert and enthusiasts blogs are the media of niche communities. And believe it or not they can also be biased and push an "agenda". They don't have the monopoly of ethicsm, they are just less scrutenized. The mainstream P2P communication is your Uncle of whatsapp and random people on Twitter. Journalism might not always be great but I'll take it over that.
You missed my point. Sure, blogs are written by "some guy on the internet", and anyone should be skeptical about anything they write. But journalists are also "some guys on the internet"! They should be kept in the same security ring. There's no difference in competence or accountability between a rando and an entitled journalist.
Re: I Am Deleting the Blog
#965Earlier quoted context omitted.
P2P information is not only "expert blogs". Expert and enthusiasts blogs are the media of niche communities. And believe it or not they can also be biased and push an "agenda". They don't have the monopoly of ethicsm, they are just less scrutenized. The mainstream P2P communication is your Uncle of whatsapp and random people on Twitter. Journalism might not always be great but I'll take it over that.
You missed my point. Sure, blogs are written by "some guy on the internet", and anyone should be skeptical about anything they write. But journalists are also "some guys on the internet"! They should be kept in the same security ring. There's no difference in competence or accountability between a rando and an entitled journalist.
I didn't miss you point. I just very much disagree that there is no difference in competence between a rando and a journalist, and there are not just some guys on internet.
Reporting news and investigating is very complicated, so complicated that yes some people are professionals and paid to do it. This is type of job where people easily say "why they didn't say that", "why they reported it this way", "I would have done it better", truth is it's not that simple. I personally think it's a difficult job to do and try not to diminish it.
Re: I Am Deleting the Blog
#966Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've seen moral fashions. What's happening now is bigger, rarer and worse. It's known as a "purity spiral" (Haynes), "mass movement" (Hoffer), "political religion" (Voegelin).
Is it a power-grab or an attempt by individuals to gain social status? I think that it has all those trappings, but underneath is a deep addiction to anger, outrage and the rush of adrenaline that accompanies it. There is also a sort of religiosity that your comment alludes to. >Various thinkers have pointed out that leftism is a kind of religion. Leftism is not a religion in the strict sense because leftist doctrine…
If you're quoting that you should maybe note that "Leftism" there means effectively anything that the author dislikes (or fits with their current PC bugbears) regardless of whether it's driven from the left side of the political spectrum of not.
Re: I Am Deleting the Blog
#967Earlier quoted context omitted.
The events of the last 4 years, make it clear to me that we are rapidly heading towards totalitarianism. I finally understand the answer to the childhood question of "But, how could this every happen here?" that used to be an automatic response to being taught about awful events in history. When there is extreme moral certainty about societal problems, people can feel that for the problems to be dealt with they will…
> The events of the last 4 years, make it clear to me that we are rapidly heading towards totalitarianism. Question is, what totalitarianism do you think we're headed towards? Trump/MAGA totalitarianism or Left/Cancel culture totalitarianism?
If Trump was interested in totalitarianism though, why would he pass up the opportunity of a lifetime during COVID to impose strict lockdowns and restrictions, and be hailed by the left while doing it?
Re: I Am Deleting the Blog
#968Earlier quoted context omitted.
One wonders what criteria the Times must be using to determine that it's worth putting Scott at credible risk for further harassment but not women gamers. Is the Times really more sympathetic to gamers than psychiatrists or bloggers? That seems like an unlikely policy, but what else could explain it? I'm stumped.
Women gamers compared to white male psychiatrist bloggers who occasionally criticise feminism ? Yes. There's no mystery here. Scott belongs to a class of people for whom sympathy is not culturally trendy at the moment.
> Already, the response has been a far cry from Gamergate in 2014, when women faced threats of death and sexual assault for critiquing the industry’s male-dominated, sexist culture.
Also women (and men) faced threats of sexual assault and violence for critiquing the media. But NYT very deliberately choses to ignore one set of threats and doxxing.
Re: I Am Deleting the Blog
#969Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s multi-faceted. In some cases NYT (or any news org of any prevailing political inclination) might want to expose real names to exercise control or rally people to cancel someone. Other times it might be more mundane, just wanting a better angle for the story or more solid corroborative details. In the case of SSC I really worry that NYT would be trying to exercise control. They probably like many things written o…
Wait, did you just claim that the NYT is part of "the modern left"? If so, that's the funniest thing I've read in the last few years. The NYT is the home of bothsidesism. It's certainly not "the modern left". And as far as the NYT writing a hit piece to shut up a semi-popular blog, I'd suggest a quick reality check how much influence either has on public discourse. The idea the NYT would need to shut up SSC is just..…
http://wilkins.law.harvard.edu/projects/2017-08_mediacloud/G...
Under US politics it is clear on the left side. It is not far left, but its not center either.
Re: I Am Deleting the Blog
#970Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm in the field - though not as prominent as Yann (who has been very nice and helpful in my few interactions with him) - and your interpretation is off. People are disagreeing with his stance that researchers should not bother exploring bias implications of their research. (He says this is because bias is a problem of data - and therefore we should focus on building cool models and let production engineers worry abo…
I agree with all of your points about the diffusion of responsibility that is common in ML, though I think you may not be sensitive enough to the harmful framing being created by the "anti-bias" side. The original locus of the debate was how the recent face-depixelation paper turned out to depixelate pictures of black faces into ones with white features. That discovery is an interesting and useful showcase for talkin…
I think this is relevant: https://twitter.com/AnimaAnandkumar/status/12711371765294161...
Nvidia AI researcher calling out OpenAI's GPT-2 over how GPT-2 is horrible because it's trained on Reddit (except it includes contents of submissions, and I'm not sure if there's no data except Reddit)
Reddit is supposedly not a good source of data to train NLP models because it's... racist? sexist? Like it's even rightist in general...
Anyway; the table looks horrific - why would they include these results? Oh, turns out paper was on bias: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.01326.pdf
Anyway; one can toy with GPT-2 large (paper is on medium, so it might be different) at talktotransformer.com
"The woman worked as a ": 2x receptionist, teacher's aide, waitress. Man: waiter, fitness instructor, spot worker, (construction?) engineer. Black man: farm hand, carpenter, carpet installer(?), technician. White man: assistant architect, [carpenter but became a shoemaker], general in the army, blacksmith.
I didn't read the paper, I admit, maybe I'm missing something here. But these tweets look like... person responsible should be fired.